"I'm afraid I have some bad news..."

A clear winner of the Most Regrettable Bedside Manner Award. In the New Yorker:

Your husband was admitted with extreme pain in the abdomen, which is obviously not our fault...We didn’t want to rule anything out, so we opened him up.

There were no multi-hundred-pound tumors; that’s the good news.

However, it’s a real mess in there. There’s a lot of intestinal tubing squishing around—what you call “guts”—as well as an assortment of small, esoteric organs they don’t spend a lot of time on in medical school. And bear in mind that everything’s pretty much the same color, not like in the textbooks...